PHOTO PROJECTS

ALLEGORY OF LOVE | 2025

The work visually conveys the idea of love as a primal force and the horizon of existence. Two hands – one red and one blue – come together, causing a rose to bloom between them. The red hand evokes the carnal and passionate dimension of the emotion, the pathos that sustains and drives the action; the blue hand, by contrast, refers to wisdom and moderation. The relationship between these two polarities gives rise to the flower, a symbol of the fullness of the heart and of a love that finds its fulfilment in human actions. The choice of colours draws on the pictorial tradition, whilst the yellow background acts as a luminous field that radiates and amplifies the scene. In this balance between energy and awareness, the image presents Love as a space of encounter and transformation.

From the catalogue “Liquida photofestival | curated by L. Tota”

THE ARTIST DIES IN ART | 2025

With the photographic project "The Artist Dies in Art", the performer stages the body as a sacrificial icon. The poses, inspired simultaneously by Christian saints and Hindu deities, a lexicon of gestures and wounds, a red rose as a symbol of ardour and offering, connote the symbolism within existentialist philosophy, problematising the relationship with Being. The investigation of Being, within the performer's poetics, is the very search for Art, for the Self and the ego in art. In this light, the golden mask of archaic funerary tradition (think of the mask of Agamemnon and the mask of the Egyptian pharaohs), as well as the title given to the work, takes on a double meaning. On the one hand, it is the death of the artist's ego in the search for Art and its rebirth in the sacred light of Art itself, as a sacred vehicle of connection with the deepest layers of Being. The image becomes an altar and a laboratory: the body is matter that exposes itself to light to reveal its limits, but also a threshold where absence and presence dialogue. Without indulging in the aesthetics of martyrdom, the artist questions the desire for transcendence and the need for incarnation, as if each photograph were a devotional act and, at the same time, an experiment in awareness that questions Being through art. His research draws on invisible forces that hold the gaze together: it is not what appears, but what weighs deeply; a secret gravity that makes pain legible, converts it into a sign and restores to the body the ancient task of becoming image, relic, memory, ritual and vehicle of spiritual knowledge. The red of the rose and the hands is passion (pathos), which the work requires in order to be created and which springs from the heart, the luminous seat of identity. The artist creates with the heart and with the heart problematises the relationship with Being through Art.

From the catalogue “Liquida photofestival - Winter edition” | curated by L. Tota”

AUTORITRATTI | CANTI RITUALI | 2022

RITUAL SONGS investigate suffering and self-love in relation to the divine. The photographs record the plasticity of the body in such a way as to reveal the presence of the soul and a lived space. They are carnal and visual prayers, like the sacred paintings of the Italian 12th century. Through the act of photographing, of imprinting one's own body form in a luminous space, the artist sought to initiate a cathartic process and focus on the spiritual crisis that occurred upon the death of her Master. When photography appeared, taking photographs was a ritual and symbolic act in both Western industrial society and traditional populations. Being photographed meant expressing the soul, communicating with the position of the body values and ideals of an individual and society. Ritual chants seek creative plastic figures of the body, which, as in tradition, can give light to deep feelings, capable of moving from the biographical to the communal and the universal. Photography is, therefore, a ritual performative action, which seeks to relate through the self-portrait body to Being. Self-portraits are rituals for discovering the verticality of the human being and thematising pain as a source of transformative relational and spiritual knowledge

CORPO RITUALE | 2021

In the project 'RITUAL BODY' through the act of photography, Marco Balbi Dipalma investigates body positions in search of a state of trance, understood as a deep creative state, to activate a spiritual transformation through the experience of the body. The artist has composed and analysed different positions and their siginifications starting from dance improvisations, searching in plasticity for a ritual body. Photography is used as a tool to reveal the photogenicity (J. Esptein) of the position, the physical sentimental luminosity of the position. The research draws on anthropologist F. Goodman's studies of body ritual postures and the photographic works of Petr Stembra. The body is investigated as a vehicle of spirituality.